Excerpted from “Ask Your Guides” by Sonia Choquette
What Are Spirit Guides?
Since most spirit guides are beings who’ve lived at least some part of their existence on Earth, it’s not surprising that they’ve come back to serve us. In fact, some guides may connect with us because they had similar challenges in their earthly lives and want to offer their guidance to ease our way. Still others may show up to help us in certain projects or tasks, because in their past lives they were masters in the discipline we’re exploring or working in.
Spirit guides may also be family members who’ve crossed over and elected to stay connected with us from the spirit plane to offer direction and help. Similarly, entities who may have shared some important relationship or spiritual work with us in past lives may choose to continue working with us in this life, in order to contribute to the continuing enrichment of our soul’s experience.
There are also spiritual teachers—who are some of the most important guides—who desire to help us learn and understand our true spiritual nature, all the while assisting us in growing our soul.
And then we have scouts and runners, or guides who’ve lived past incarnations very close to the earth, such as Native Americans, who help us to become more connected to the natural world.
In addition to all of these wonderful entities, keep in mind that the guide who comes through to assist you may even be your own Higher Self, which is as beautiful and enlightened as any other guide that you may meet.
Contacting Spirit Guides
Once you’re open to sharing your concerns, challenges, and successes with your guides, they, in turn, will make subtle yet direct contact with you, approaching you very gently at first. In fact, until you become more familiar with their unique vibrations, you may wonder if you’re imagining the connection and, consequently, decide to dismiss it.
One of the greatest obstacles to connecting with your guides is having unrealistic expectations of what receiving guidance should be like. Most people are surprised by how understated spirit guides can be. Conditioned by Hollywood and bad horror novels, they expect strange beings in space suits to beam down to them in the night when, in reality, most spirit guidance is as subtle as the brush of a butterfly’s wing on your cheek.
Understanding Your Spirit Guides
Contact with spirit guides occurs on a deep, intimate level—not as some external entity coming at you. The art and skill of accurately perceiving your guides comes from the ability to comfortably tune in and listen to these subtleties and accept them as important communications.
Most spirit guides connect with us in such a fashion that it feels as though you’re hearing your own inner voice—however, the difference lies in what’s between your voice and that of your guide.
One key to success when making direct contact with our guides is to practice voicing aloud—without censoring— any inner guidance that we get. In the five-sensory, insensitive, world, we’re conditioned to doubt ourselves and to surrender our lives to any external voice of authority. In the six-sensory world, our inner voice is the highest authority and prevails over any other. We must listen to it, respect it, voice it aloud, and honor what we feel without hesitation or apology.
And remember that your spirit guides’ most important function is to connect with your soul and to make subtle suggestions . . . but they only do so when asked. By talking to your guides, you’re simply sounding out your options, just as you’d bounce ideas off of a trusted confidant—and the more you speak to them, the more they respond to you.
Asking Your Spirit Guides For Help
Whenever you’re in doubt or in need of guidance, say aloud: “Let me ask my guides,” and then do exactly that. Next, let them answer by saying, “They say [fill in the blank].” Don’t worry that you’re making things up—just listen to the content and vibration of the words that emerge as you let your inner being speak freely.
It’s also very helpful to work with friends who are open and trustworthy, and who share your interest and desire to connect with guides. Take turns—first you, then your friend—asking the guides for insight, and then, with each of you as a witness to the other, sound out all that runs through your inner being, sorting out the different vibrations in the answer. The key is to be comfortable, enjoy the conversations, and treat them as normal and important.
Connecting with your guides is the art of subtle communication, and the more that you practice sharing your inner world, the more comfortably it becomes a part of your outer world.